The Weekly Watch

Submitted by Lookout on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 7:03am

Clouds of Hypocrisy Surrounding the Storms and Fires

Did you hear T-rump this week in North Dakota? He's glad to have dirty tar sands oil flowing through a pipeline destined to leak. He's thrilled he got us out of the job killing Paris climate agreement. Then in the same speech admits we've had one disastrous hurricane and we're about to have another....and who knew North Dakota could have droughts? It reminds me of the tobacco execs denying that tobacco is addictivehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08 (1.5 min)

The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable that climate is becoming increasingly variable and intense, and yet the US government will not allow mention of global warming? Talk about heads in the sand. You know they know. They're lying just like the tobacco execs to save their profit (and lose our habitable planet).

If you missed T-rump's speech, here are the quotes I find so hypocritical -
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: In order to protect American industry and workers, we withdrew the United States from the job-killing Paris climate accord. Job killer. People have no idea. Many people have no idea how bad that was. And right here in North Dakota, the Dakota Access pipeline is finally open for business. ... I also did Keystone. You know about Keystone, another one, big one. Big. First couple of days in office, those two. Forty-eight thousand jobs. Tremendous, tremendous thing. I think environmentally better. I really believe that. Environmentally better.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I want to take a moment to send our thoughts and prayers to the people of Texas and Louisiana, who have truly suffered through a catastrophic hurricane, one of the worst hurricanes in our country’s history. And guess what. We have another one coming. ... The one that’s coming now, Irma, they’re saying, is largest one in recorded history in the Atlantic Ocean, coming out of the Atlantic, which gets big ones. ... I also want to tell the people of North Dakota and the Western states, who are feeling the pain of the devastating drought, that we are with you 100 percent. One hundred percent. ... I just said to the governor, "I didn’t know you had droughts this far north." Guess what. You have them. But we’re working hard on it, and it’ll disappear. It’ll all go away.

"Leadership must come from countries that are high-income, have benefited from fossil fuel extraction, and that are historically responsible for significant emissions."—The Lofoten Declaration, a far-reaching document in which 220 organizations call for rapid, global transition to achieve a low carbon future.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/09/07/unprecedented-lofoten-decla...

"We must organize our communities to create a new socialist order and overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. We must achieve full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism." Chris Hedgeshttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/diseases-of-despair/

Don't Worry If Global Warming doesn't Cause Extinction, A Nuclear War Could.
When you look at US foreign policy the stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming...

Chicago Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a young populist politician who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been forced off a gubernatorial ticket that he only recently joined, after coming under fire for his ties to DSA and the group’s support of the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement.https://theintercept.com/2017/09/06/socialist-forced-off-democratic-camp...

Fighting for DACA - It isn’t just Trump and Sessions who own the cruel decision to end DACA. Ten Republican state attorneys general and the governor of Idaho threatened to sue the federal government over DACA and declared Sept. 5 their deadline in an attempt to force Trump’s hand.https://www.truthdig.com/articles/must-fight-trumps-decision-end-daca/

Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush and author of “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools” talks with Chris Hedges. (29 min)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BWVInIJ86A

Corrupt corporations
Credit-reporting giant Equifax has just disclosed that in the summer of 2017, hackers gained access to the personal information of 143 million of its consumers. The hackers obtains access to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some cases, even credit cards.
But the behavior of Equifax in the wake of the cyberattack has been horrifying. Three Equifax Managers sold their stock in the company before the cyber attack was revealed, raising questions about potential insider trading. Worse still, the company offered “free” identity theft protection for those impacted, but only if the consumer waived their right to sue Equifax in a class action lawsuit!https://theintercept.com/2017/09/08/equifax-is-proving-why-forced-arbitr...
Bill Black weighs in on the Equifax scandal (22 min video with text)http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19960:Equifax-Data-Breach-is-a-10-out-of...

Even the non-profits are being bought out and saying one thing while doing another. Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, and Chris Hedges explore how corporations have used their money to take over the nonprofit organizations and regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen from predatory corporate practices. (29 min)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJURmeW2M04

Is There Anywhere in the World Where Planet and People Come First? Yes.

There are countries focused on the health and happiness of its people. In this illuminating talk, Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country's mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation. (18 min)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lc_dlVrg5M

It will take us all - countries, cities, and individual communities to reach for peace and the greening of the world. What choice do we have. All we can do is make the best of whatever situation we encounter. There is so much to do (and undo). It is possible, but powerful greed stands in the way. Stand true as you can against the hypocrisy. I hope you find peace in your corner of the universe. Wishing us all the best as we weather the storms.

Comments

Chris Hedges is joined by former writers for The Village Voice, Tom Robbins and Michael Musto. The New York City alternative weekly newspaper announced recently it is ending its free print edition. (27 min)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9VrZf4lin0

So much for me to go back and listen to! Thanks for your work to bring those to us. Knowledge is power and you are making us more powerful!

Bhutan does not measure GDP, they measure GNH - Gross National Happiness - I used to teach this to my students. There's a great film on it - your clip is part of that film. It's very inspiring.

Beautiful day here today - we got a great rain both Thursday and Friday evenings, so everything is greening up. I also now own 20 chickens - inherited from my supplier who is moving. Anyone want to buy fresh eggs? $3/dozen!

Have a beautiful day, everyone!

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8 users have voted.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

We're going to get chickens now that I've retired from the band and no longer have to hit the road (after 30 years). I'll be home long enough to tend them! I plan to build a chicken tractor and pasture raise them.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTfgmeId7mM (7 min) I'll probably wait till spring.

Hope you have a good Sunday!

So much for me to go back and listen to! Thanks for your work to bring those to us. Knowledge is power and you are making us more powerful!

Bhutan does not measure GDP, they measure GNH - Gross National Happiness - I used to teach this to my students. There's a great film on it - your clip is part of that film. It's very inspiring.

Beautiful day here today - we got a great rain both Thursday and Friday evenings, so everything is greening up. I also now own 20 chickens - inherited from my supplier who is moving. Anyone want to buy fresh eggs? $3/dozen!

Have a beautiful day, everyone!

up

6 users have voted.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

It is past time to stand up and speak out -about climate, wars, capitalism, health care, the environment, education, incarceration, media, ...oh my the list continues. Sometimes I feel I'm yelling into the hurricane and no one can hear.

Thanks for dropping by and listening!

extraordinary Watch, many thanks for the work and the concentration on Climate Change!
"Now would be the time for that silence to find a voice." amen to that statement.

The picture in your essay is a powerful image of the hurricane. Since it is already in your essay, I thought I would ask if you would do a copy and paste of the code and insert in your essay per the instructions below. Amanda and I had this conversation, and it worked for her. So I thought I would share it with you and hope you will give it a shot.

When you open "new essay" to write a new post, go down to the bottom of the page. Under embed video, there is a place to enter and upload an image. The image you enter will appear when your essay is transferred to Twitter or Facebook using their respective icons at the top of your essay. If you are including an image in your diary anyway, posting and uploading the image link will include it in your headline on fb. If you don't put anything in there, it will default to the c99 logo. Test it out by clicking on the FB icon to cross post your essay to your facebook account. If it worked you will see the image you put into the widget in the popup. If it didn't, you will see the default logo or gibberish in the popup.

Drop by our caucus99percent facebook page and check it out for yourself. You should be able to distinguish c99 cross posts from cross posts from other places that are shared to c99's page. There is a huge difference in look. Evening Blues, Joe, always includes his banner in the image widget. gjohnsit never uses the facebook image widget. If I had access, I would do it for the writer when I posted to FB, but I do not. So whether or not your FB post includes a picture is entirely up to you.

We all appreciate all of the essays you contribute and don't want to make doing them more work for you. Give it a shot when you are writing a new essay and feel like experimenting. When and if you can do it, great. When not, don't worry about it.

Last time I added the photo at the end of the composition page set with the scheduler, I lost my essay. I've been gun shy since then, but I'll try again.

The picture in your essay is a powerful image of the hurricane. Since it is already in your essay, I thought I would ask if you would do a copy and paste of the code and insert in your essay per the instructions below. Amanda and I had this conversation, and it worked for her. So I thought I would share it with you and hope you will give it a shot.

When you open "new essay" to write a new post, go down to the bottom of the page. Under embed video, there is a place to enter and upload an image. The image you enter will appear when your essay is transferred to Twitter or Facebook using their respective icons at the top of your essay. If you are including an image in your diary anyway, posting and uploading the image link will include it in your headline on fb. If you don't put anything in there, it will default to the c99 logo. Test it out by clicking on the FB icon to cross post your essay to your facebook account. If it worked you will see the image you put into the widget in the popup. If it didn't, you will see the default logo or gibberish in the popup.

Drop by our caucus99percent facebook page and check it out for yourself. You should be able to distinguish c99 cross posts from cross posts from other places that are shared to c99's page. There is a huge difference in look. Evening Blues, Joe, always includes his banner in the image widget. gjohnsit never uses the facebook image widget. If I had access, I would do it for the writer when I posted to FB, but I do not. So whether or not your FB post includes a picture is entirely up to you.

We all appreciate all of the essays you contribute and don't want to make doing them more work for you. Give it a shot when you are writing a new essay and feel like experimenting. When and if you can do it, great. When not, don't worry about it.

Thanks and good luck.

up

1 user has voted.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

When I just now clicked on the FB link, I didn't see anything but the c99 image. Iam going to move this conversation to message, and we'll practice a new "test" essay. If it happens to publish, I'm sure our team won't mind while we practice. I will send you a message.

Abby Martin posted empire files this morning. I'm listening now.
Dr. Gerald Horne is the Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and is the author of over 20 books on slavery and the Black liberation movement; most recently "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States".https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkYZtfxj0RM (33 min)

Thanks for the Franks piece. I'll watch it later. Here are a couple of other things I ran across this morning...

as I am living a life without TV and trapped in an area without good signals, I feel clueless. I had no influx of images of all the horrible climate change catastrophies. You help a lot.

Here a little thingy from Germany. When I just read the headline, I said to myself, 'heh, I am rather poor in Germany than in the US' (yep I still had that default bias). But then all that crumbles into dust, more or less, these days. My memories of the seventies and eighties caused me to think that way. But it comes to an end. Now I doubt everthing I hear. May be the best thing is not listening and not voting. I won't vote.

the corporate coup is complete. Glad you found the climate info pertinent. As Irma bears down it seems a good focus today.

All the best

as I am living a life without TV and trapped in an area without good signals, I feel clueless. I had no influx of images of all the horrible climate change catastrophies. You help a lot.

Here a little thingy from Germany. When I just read the headline, I said to myself, 'heh, I am rather poor in Germany than in the US' (yep I still had that default bias). But then all that crumbles into dust, more or less, these days. My memories of the seventies and eighties caused me to think that way. But it comes to an end. Now I doubt everthing I hear. May be the best thing is not listening and not voting. I won't vote.

@Lookout
I mean to read Hedges for me is like grabbing a rescue ring in the water(similarly to what our c99p image on the bottom represents). He makes me feel that I am not insane and I need that reinforcment and mental confirmation. The Great Flood
Starting like this is already a hook to go on further.

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles—and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

and this looks like a lot of revenge from the up on high to me:

As this column is being written, three key military facilities in Florida are evacuated: the Miami-area headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America; the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, in charge of overseas operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia; and the Naval Air Station in Key West. There will soon come a day when obliteration of infrastructure will prohibit military operations from returning. Add to the list of endangered military installations Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, the U.S. missile base in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia and numerous other military sites in coastal areas and it becomes painfully clear that the existential peril facing the empire is not in the Middle East but in the seas and the skies. There are 128 U.S. military installations at risk from rising sea levels, including Navy, Air Force, Marine and Army facilities in Virginia. Giant vertical rulers dot the highway outside the Norfolk naval base to allow motorists to determine if the water is too deep to drive through. In two decades, maybe less, the main road to the base will be impassable at high tide daily.

Sounds like the deluge. Need to build Noah's ark?
OK the following gets apocalyptic. If you can read it ... I needed to stop for a moment.

The water will continue to rise. “It will have a metallic sheen and will smell bad,” Goodell writes. “Kids will get strange rashes and fevers. More people will leave [low areas]. Seawalls will crumble. In a few decades, low-lying neighborhoods will be knee-deep. Wooden houses will collapse into a sea of soda bottles, laundry detergent jugs, and plastic toothbrushes. Human bones, floated out of caskets, will be a common sight. Treasure hunters will kayak in, using small robotic submersibles to search for coins and jewelry. Modern office buildings and condo towers will lean as salt water corrodes the concrete foundations and eats away at the structural beams. Fish will school in the classrooms. Oysters will grow on submerged light poles. Religious leaders will blame sinners for the drowning of the city.”

The damage suffered by Houston, Tampa and Miami is not an anomaly. It is the beginning of the end. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

#10.1
I mean to read Hedges for me is like grabbing a rescue ring in the water(similarly to what our c99p image on the bottom represents). He makes me feel that I am not insane and I need that reinforcment and mental confirmation. The Great Flood
Starting like this is already a hook to go on further.

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles—and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

and this looks like a lot of revenge from the up on high to me:

As this column is being written, three key military facilities in Florida are evacuated: the Miami-area headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America; the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, in charge of overseas operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia; and the Naval Air Station in Key West. There will soon come a day when obliteration of infrastructure will prohibit military operations from returning. Add to the list of endangered military installations Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, the U.S. missile base in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia and numerous other military sites in coastal areas and it becomes painfully clear that the existential peril facing the empire is not in the Middle East but in the seas and the skies. There are 128 U.S. military installations at risk from rising sea levels, including Navy, Air Force, Marine and Army facilities in Virginia. Giant vertical rulers dot the highway outside the Norfolk naval base to allow motorists to determine if the water is too deep to drive through. In two decades, maybe less, the main road to the base will be impassable at high tide daily.

Sounds like the deluge. Need to build Noah's ark?
OK the following gets apocalyptic. If you can read it ... I needed to stop for a moment.

The water will continue to rise. “It will have a metallic sheen and will smell bad,” Goodell writes. “Kids will get strange rashes and fevers. More people will leave [low areas]. Seawalls will crumble. In a few decades, low-lying neighborhoods will be knee-deep. Wooden houses will collapse into a sea of soda bottles, laundry detergent jugs, and plastic toothbrushes. Human bones, floated out of caskets, will be a common sight. Treasure hunters will kayak in, using small robotic submersibles to search for coins and jewelry. Modern office buildings and condo towers will lean as salt water corrodes the concrete foundations and eats away at the structural beams. Fish will school in the classrooms. Oysters will grow on submerged light poles. Religious leaders will blame sinners for the drowning of the city.”

The damage suffered by Houston, Tampa and Miami is not an anomaly. It is the beginning of the end. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Ok, onwards to ark building. What else is there to say?

up

1 user has voted.

—

“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

after it's too late to stop the ever-increasing rate of climate change. Then, like all short-sighted, selfish greedheads, they will be shamed and ostracized, but it won't matter this time because the planet will be coasting to uninhabitability. Thanks greedheads.

after it's too late to stop the ever-increasing rate of climate change. Then, like all short-sighted, selfish greedheads, they will be shamed and ostracized, but it won't matter this time because the planet will be coasting to uninhabitability. Thanks greedheads.

up

1 user has voted.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"